[ANN] Jabber

Darius,
> > or by posting to a blog,
> Would this be trying to duplicate the Herculean effort that the OSAF
> foundation is already working on?
>http://www.osafoundation.org/>
Short answer: no. Chandler is an interesting case study for open source for
a variety of reasons. However, I've been using Squeak for too long; there's
nothing there to make me believe that it is (or should be) a 'Herculean'
effort, even though Chandler has some smart guys coding it up.
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Of servers and such: There's an inherent advantage of using image based
development on the server side. What I call the data base wranglers (Zope,
Groove Networks, Lotus Notes, etc) the server basically sits there and makes
queries against a database, and then spits out some stuff back down the
line. Sometimes it serves some static files. Once you have the protocol
layer and database hookup coded, nothing much interesting happens from a
software development point of view, just a whole lot of hoops and hurdles
that you have to jump through.
Typically, the server is implemented by a whole bunch of small text files
that get interpreted. However, it's a bitch to develop for; you end up
editing all of these little files all over the place. Development on such
beasts is not very pleasant, though people insist that Emacs is a great
development environment.
So you end up with Slashdot or Zope CMS or whatever. Personally, I don't
think that's where the challenge is in web development.
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Web logs: There are lots of different ways to look at web logs (blogs). You
can look at them as a collection of of files in a given directory, a data
base query, as pages in a wiki, etc. There are a few protocols on how to
'publish' to weblogs, and how people can make comments or trackbacks, but
it's all pretty simple stuff. There are well defined protocols on how to
publish these pages, there's no rocket science going on there.
Squeak already has most of this built in, except for perhaps a nice little
calendar application to group the entries, and a good way to tie together
all of the different server ideas. Commanche probably can do a lot of this
as is, unfortunately there's not a whole lot of documentation other than the
code.
Almost all of this is trivial, a "Simple Matter of Programming" as I've
heard famous people say.
Jim Benson